"Dress for Less": Choosing the Best Budget Laptop. Page 6

We are going to take a closer look at the budget notebook solutions available in the today’s market. We will look at the sub-$800 models from Acer, ASUS, Fujitsu, HP Compaq, LG, Samsung and Toshiba and try to find out what exactly the user can get for such an attractive price.

ASUS A3500L

I won’t dwell on this one for long as we have already reviewed it on our site in the article called ASUS A3500L Notebook: Stylish Doesn’t Mean Expensive. I’ll just give you some bare facts. The first fact is that the notebook has got cheaper and now costs about $800 instead of $1000. In the total of its characteristics and the configuration the ASUS A3500L is in fact one of the leaders of this review. The only thing I can complain about is that its USB ports are all rather inconveniently placed on the rear panel. The screen is not actually perfect, either. The maximum brightness is rather too low and the speed of the matrix might be higher and the colors might be more saturated. The rest of the display characteristics are good, however, and taken as a whole, it is not worse than the best LCD screens in this test session (I mean the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro V2030 and the HP Compaq nx6110). For a mere $800, the user gets an excellent high-quality notebook, which besides the compact size (like that of a notebook with a 15” screen) features an advanced enough configuration. The selection of I/O connectors is fine, and there is even an SD/MMC/MS card reader built in. Moreover, this sample, unlike the sample we tested in our lab earlier, is shipped with a traditional bag ASUS includes with all its notebooks.

With its full-capacity battery, not-so-bad LCD display and preinstalled Windows XP Home Edition, the A3500L is one of the best buys in this class of devices. My subjective feelings from working with this notebook are very positive, while the objective performance numbers will be given to you at the end of the review. I think it is a very appealing option to buy an $800 notebook that looks more expensive than it really is and differs from the senior models in a slightly cut-down configuration only.